Whistleblowers

Whistleblowers are usually ordinary people, often longstanding employees and experts in their field, who take huge professional and personal risks to blow the whistle on corporate and governmental wrongdoing. They are often a lesser-known but vitally important part of government and industry regulatory and advisory systems. They are generally harassed, vilified, and fired or forced to resign.

Here are a few whistleblowers that didn't succumb and some cover-ups that didn't succeed.

Whistleblowers

 * Bruce Boler: Boler, an EPA biologist, resigned in 2003 to protest the acceptance by the EPA of a developer-financed study that concluded that wetlands give off more pollutants than they absorb. The study suggested that golf courses and other developments would be better for the environment.


 * Teresa Chambers: Chambers, former US Park Police Chief, was fired on Friday, July 9, 2004 after criticising the lack of funding for the US Park Police divison from the Bush administration in interviews with the media.


 * Richard A. Clarke: Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council at time of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Serving in the White House under three presidents, he resigned in January 2003 and went on to publish the book highly critical of the Bush administration, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror--What Really Happened.


 * Cynthia Cooper: In June 2002 Cynthia Cooper, of the WorldCom internal-auditing division, informed its board that the company had covered up $3.8 billion in losses through phony accounting practices, exposing the fraud that led to its downfall.


 * Sibel Edmonds: Edmonds is a former FBI translator who was hired shortly after 9/11 to translate intelligence related to the attack. According to her, the FBI had information that an attack using airplanes was being planned prior to Sept. 11, 2001. She said that one of her fellow FBI agents contacted FBI headquarters before Sept. 11 and told them Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker caught before the attacks, was the "type that might try to fly a plane into the World Trade Center."


 * Daniel Ellsberg: When Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing government deceptions on the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon responded with the break-in into the office of Ellsberg's psychoanalyst and the subsequent cover-up that became known as Watergate.


 * Richard S. Foster: Foster, a longtime chief analyst of Medicare costs said that Bush administration officials threatened to fire him if he disclosed to Congress that the prescription drug legislation proposed by the White House was significantly more costly than Congress had been told.


 * David J. Graham: A medical doctor and 20-year veteran of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Graham is Associate Director of the FDA Office of Drug Safety. Following Merck & Co.'s withdrawal of their pain medication Vioxx in September 2004 for causing an estimated 27,000 strokes, heart attacks and deaths, Graham told a U.S. Senate hearing that FDA conflicts of interest left the nation "virtually defenseless" against similar drug problems.
 * David Kay


 * David Lappa: A nuclear engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who resigned in 1998 after 20 years of service, Lappa filed a lawsuit saying the lab retaliated against him for reporting plutonium-handling violations. He settled a whistle-blower lawsuit against the lab for $250,000.


 * David Lewis: Lewis was a microbiologist at the EPA for 31 years. In a peer-reviewed article in Environmental Science and Technology he showed that pathogens could easily remain undetected in untreated sewage sludge. Since the government is pushing the use of this sludge for agricultural fertilizer, Lewis was harassed and finally fired in May of 2003. At a hearing on the role of science in shaping public policy he charged the EPA with "corrupt[ing] the scientific peer review process in order to support certain political agendas and further the agency's self-interest."


 * John Oliveira: Lt. John Oliveira, a former navy public affairs officer who oversaw embedded journalists on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt criticized Bush administration policies in Iraq. Oliveira said. "I had to get on television every day to talk to the American people and the international public and continue to sell them on the administration's policies, which I did not believe in…I'm [now] doing what I can to support our troops. Up until two months ago, I was one of those troops. I was unable to voice my opinion regarding the administration policies on how they were using our military. And one of the key things I say to Mr. Bush, 'support our troops and join us.' Because the way he's doing it is not supporting our troops, it's using them."


 * Paul H. O'Neill


 * Douglas Parker: An employee of the U.S. Forest Service for nearly four decades, fired in late 2005 after filing a whistleblower complaint "that pointed to what he called a 'systemic problem' when it comes to proper pesticide use across several forests in New Mexico and Arizona," reported the Associated Press. Parker told AP, "The whole reason behind this is I reported some significant pesticide misuse problems to the regional forester and they don't want to have controls over this process. ... They want to be pesticide cowboys and go out there and do what they want to do without consideration of compliance with their own policies, regulations and environmental laws." His Forest Service supervisor contended that Parker was fired for violations of office protocols.


 * Coleen Rowley: In a 2002 memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, FBI staff attorney Coleen Rowley accused FBI headquarters of ignoring pleas from her Minneapolis, Minn., field office to investigate alleged 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now indicted as a September 11 co-conspirator.


 * Eric Shinseki: Army General Eric Shinseki, prior to the invasion of Iraq, warned Congress that the Bush administration grossly underestimated the military manpower required to pacify Iraq.


 * Donald Sweeney: Dr. Donald Sweeney, a senior Army Corps of Engineers economist, blew the whistle on "serious violations of rules, laws, and regulations at the highest levels of Corps management that could have resulted in gross fraud, waste, and abuse of federal resources." When, after five years of working on a proposed billion-dollar construction project on the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, he reported his concerns about cost to his superiors, Sweeney was taken off the project. "Sweeney took his complaint to the Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency charged with protecting government whistle-blowers and investigating their allegations. The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) presented the evidence to the Army which, in essence, acknowledged and confirmed Sweeney's allegations."


 * Sherron Watkins: Sherron Watkins is the Enron vice president who wrote a letter to chairman Kenneth Lay in the summer of 2001 on "suspicions of accounting improprieties," that later became public during a congressional investigation of Enron.


 * Frederic Whitehurst: Frederic Whitehurst, a chemist and lab supervisor who was the FBI's top bomb residue expert, claimed he was singled out for retaliation when he refused to recant or to doctor his reports to support the FBI's urea nitrate bomb theory as the cause for the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His complaint triggered an overhaul of the FBI's world-renowned crime lab and he settled a lawsuit against the FBI for more than $1.16 million.


 * Jeffrey S. Wigand: Wigand, a tobacco industry executive, exposed the tobacco industry's chemical alteration of nicotine to make it stronger. The exposé formed the basis for the movie The Insider.


 * Joseph Wilson
 * Victor J. DeNoble: Former Philip Morris scientist with expertise in behavioral psychology, nicotine analogues and addiction.


 * Judson Witham : Construction Supervisor and Author from Lake George NY. Provided enormous amounts of information to Texas Newspapers the major television networks like the Conroe Courier, Houston Chronicle and Houston Post about LARGE SCALE Land Subdivision and Bank / S&L Lootings during the 1980s.  See Houston Chronicles Archives on Illegal Subdivisions, Colonias as well as bank and S&L Lootings see Houston Chronicle Listings

Accord puts streets on road to recovery http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=1988_522430 CATHY GORDON : Staff CONROE - In the Southern Pines subdivision east of here, gone are the signs "Slip `N Slide Drive," "Dip `N Dive Lane" and "Rub Board Road." 02/12/1988 POTHOLES & PROMISES/Montgomery County's crumbling subdivisions/ Developers facing county crackdown CATHY GORDON : http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=1987_471171 Staff Homes resembling shacks border its pothole-riddled dirt roads. 06/23/1987 POTHOLES & PROMISES/Montgomery County's crumbling subdivisions/ Investors mired in muddy mess of sub... CATHY GORDON : Staff We have potholes big enough to park in." Resident Donna Meeks said she, too, is tired of the potholes.  06/22/1987 Resident's crusading `fans fire'/Subdivision's critic outlines difficulties CATHY GORDON : Staff  http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=1987_471041 I about know them by heart," Witham proclaims, measuring the pothole's depth with a fallen twig. He exhibits pictures of potholes in Pinewood Village, their widths and lengths duly noted. 06/22/1987 POTHOLES & PROMISES/Montgomery County's crumbling subdivisions/ Homeowners handle property woes CATHY GORDON : Staff http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=1987_470841 06/21/1987

Related SourceWatch resources

 * Bush administration and torture
 * Freedom of Information/A Guide For Whistleblowers
 * Government Accountability Project
 * Iran-Contra
 * Office of Special Counsel
 * U.S. federal oil and gas royalties
 * Watergate
 * Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2007
 * Whistleblowing/Australia

Books

 * Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror--What Really Happened (Free Press, 2004)
 * John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995).
 * Ron Suskind with Paul O'Neill, The Price of Loyalty (Simon and Schuster, 2004).
 * Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Exposed My Wife's CIA Identity--A Diplomat's Memoir (Carroll & Graf, 2004)

External resources

 * Website, Whistleblower Action Network, accessed April 2008.
 * Website, National Whistleblower Center, accessed April 2008.

More external links can be found at SourceWatch articles for many of the individuals listed above.